Japanese Phonetics #2: How I Studied Japanese / Series Philosophy

hi everyone and welcome to the second episode of Japanese phonetics by Dogen in this video I will talk about my Japanese educational background using topic to provide context for the structure and content of this series while talking about my Japanese learning experiences I will mention several Japanese language programs I encourage you to watch this video in its entirety before you leave to check these resources and you'll understand why as the video continues I began to study Japanese by myself during eighth grade I bought the Oxford take off in Japanese program which includes 4 cassette tapes and one textbook from a local used bookstore and I went through the program until I finished it I did a single lesson each night immediately before bed and repeated lessons whenever I didn't feel confident in the content oxfords takeoff in Japanese is a very good program and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to get started with Japanese it does use dual Maji rather than hiragana katakana and kanji but I don't believe this is a particularly bad thing and we'll explain why in a bit after finishing the Oxford series I tried several other programs such as Pimsleur Japanese rosetta stone I felt that all of them were quite slow disorganized and most of all vapid I stopped actively studying Japanese when I started martial arts tricky and during my first year of high school but I continued to listen to Japanese music every day and spent five to ten hours each week watching a Japanese internet TV show that Avox one of the major record labels in Japan used to broadcast the first time I ever took a Japanese class was during my second year of college at the University of Washington as I had not been actively studying Japanese for a long time and because my go-to resource for Japanese was a dole Maji based program I didn't perform well on the placement test and ended up placing into Japanese 101 so introduction to Japanese while taking this class I also signed up for linguistics 101 it was during this course that I learned two things which fundamentally changed my Japanese study habits one writing systems around half of the languages in the world do not have a writing system despite this these languages are considered living languages while the living language can be spoken but not written it cannot be written but not spoken to put things simply this knowledge led me to believe that the essence of language light in spoken language in the case of oral languages a spoken Japanese word can be represented by Chinese characters Japanese characters the Roman alphabet the International phonetic alphabet etc but no matter how you write or do not write the word the spoken language itself does not change and point to the brain's ability to accurately mimic spoken language deteriorates greatly over time I knew this before taking this course as do most people but learning about this phenomenon with explicit numbers and academic studies in combination with the aforementioned points spurred me to actually change my study habits as developing a Japanese native-like accent was one of my goals at the time I suddenly felt a sense of urgency and decided to put all of my efforts into phonetics and basically postpone everything else until I felt that my Japanese pronunciation and pitch accent was close to native within the scope of my lexicon or vocabulary at that particular time rather than trying to memorize a lot of kanji or get a high grade in Japanese 101 I rented p.m. Suzuki's phonetics of Japanese language from the University Library and spent the majority of my total study hours alone concentrating on pronunciation I intentionally did this slowly as I wanted to properly process the information and also because I was very busy with other classes tricking which was my primary passion at the time and also my part-time job as time passed I became more and more interested in Japanese phonetics and eventually I decided to change my major from international business to Japanese linguistics that being said the Japanese linguistics major at the University of Washington deals more with morphology syntax and social linguistics than phonology or phonetics so my ongoing phonetic studies were almost always done outside of class I studied abroad at Keio University in Tokyo during my junior year of college when I arrived in Japan I was about where I thought it would be in terms of language ability I placed into a lower-level class but my accent was comparable if not better than most of the students in the intermediate and even some of the advanced classes however I still wasn't satisfied with my speaking abilities and strongly believed that I should spend my entire year abroad concentrating on speaking rather than again kanji or advanced grammar so I did several things one I took as few classes as possible such that I could surround myself with Japanese natives rather than foreigners trying to learn Japanese - I pestered my Japanese teachers to teach me pitch accent until they opened the first of its kind pitch accent class and three I moved out of Kaos international dorm and began a homestay with a Japanese family during my year in Tokyo I studied hard and by the time I got on my return flight to Seattle I felt as though I was conversationally fluent in Japanese that is to say I could understand and partake in most everyday conversations at a natural speed moreover I felt that my Japanese accent was among the best of the students studying abroad that year including those who had passed the n1 test and were taking not Japanese classes but normal classes such as economics in Japanese naturally these students reading writing and advanced communication abilities were far greater than my own I went back to the States finished my degree in Japanese linguistics then I moved back to Japan on the jet program by this time I felt as though I had reached a point of diminishing returns with regards to phonetics study and finally decided to switch my focus to reading and writing I spent almost all of my time during my full three years on the jet program writing short stories and Japanese and getting them corrected by native speakers through a website such as language 8 which I introduced on a previous Dogen studying both spoken and written Japanese and began to focus soley creative writing in Japanese which I have been doing for about four or five years now albeit almost entirely on professionally I currently work at a Japanese University as the only non Japanese member of the school's domestic admissions team and I'm married to a Japanese woman though we speak both Japanese and English at home so to sum up my Japanese educational history I studied conversational Japanese by myself for about a year and a half during my early teens I kept myself exposed to native Japanese through music TV shows and movies throughout high school I studied Japanese phonetics intensively throughout college mostly outside of class I spent my first year out of college playing catch-up with written Japanese and I have spent all of my time since then writing short stories and essays in Japanese and working and living in a mostly Japanese environment I strongly believe that intentionally limiting my initial Japanese studies to phonetics is why my spoken Japanese is at its current level I was able to avoid a lot of the bad speaking habits most people develop immediately when studying the language comprehensively again you can learn kanji or archaic grammar anytime but it becomes comparatively more difficult to mimic foreign language sounds as you get older and even harder to fix bad habits once they have been established in fact it's actually harder to forget your bad habits than it is to establish good ones this is why I don't believe that using take off in Japanese a bow emoji based Japanese resource was a particularly bad thing it allowed me to focus all of my attention on what was being said rather than making me split my attention between listening and reading or speaking and writing here's where things get semi controversial take all of the following with a grain of salt and remember that I'm trying to sell you a phonetics based program I believe that if your end goal is to develop a native like accent it's unproductive to split your study hours equally between speaking and writing especially at the beginner and intermediate level I believe that every time you learn a new without memorizing the pitch accent pattern you are potentially developing a bad phonetic habit so assuming you aren't a language sivan and that you didn't have the luxury of living in a Japanese environment during your childhood I believe that in order to sound native or close to native you have to study phonetics as soon as possible and that you have to take these studies seriously if you are currently studying Japanese and hope to eventually speak with little-to-no foreign accent my personal advice would be to throttle down on your kanji and vocabulary studies and to allocate this time to memorizing pitch accent and pronunciation patterns look to Vince Lombardi for inspiration practice doesn't make perfect perfect practice makes perfect use phonetic knowledge and an intentionally staggered study plan to nip your gaijin accent in the butt I hope that my series Japanese phonetics becomes one of the many resources you use to accomplish this and that's all for this lesson in lesson three I will be covering common misconceptions with regards to Japanese phonetics in Lesson four I will be covering phonetic awareness and useful phonetic practices and in lesson five I will begin to introduce Japanese pitch accent terminology the various free third party resources you can use to supplement your phonetic studies will come shortly after that thank you for your continued support and see you again soon [Music]

Channel: Dogen

Views: 82,327

Rating: 4.9766331 out of 5

Keywords: Dogen, Japan, Japanese, America, American, Speak, Speaking, Foreign, Foreigner, Rakugo, Story, Storytime, Stories, 外国人, 外人, 日本, 好き, 日本語, うまい, 上手, 落語, 話す, 喋る, しゃべる, 外国人が見たnippon, 漫才, コメディー, JLPT, N1, N2, N3, Advanced, Super, Lesson, 日本語能力, pronunciation, pitch, pitch-accent, accent, アクセント, phonetics, Patreon, philosophy, background, series

Id: 3SiBj75Dd0I

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/dogentricks]

Thanks for the share Lucia! If anyone has any questions about this video or the series feel free to let me know!

[u/Nukemarine]

Even in my native language of English, I couldn't grasp the ability to understand written pitch accent. Started with the whole schwa thing and went on from there whenever it came to reading anything more complex than dictionary level pronunciation. To me it's been copying what I hear and mimicking that as close as I can.

Personally, that's sort of why I pushed for native level literacy and fluency on the consumption side of things (reading and listening). This is to get into consuming native level entertainment media on the idea that with large amounts of comprehensible input one will intuitively output close to native level assuming they mimic early and often. My thinking is not everyone will have access to a tutor but thanks to the internet they should have access to the study material and entertainment media anywhere in the world.

Hope your program takes off including your patreon. Personally I'm more interested in your comedy skits but getting more and more people into Japanese is never a bad thing. If you're into hearing a butchering of the spoken language you can drop by my (currently daily) Japanese study stream on YouTube.

[u/KeenWolfPaw]

I'm not convinced that unlearning incorrect pronunciation is harder than learning it. You need to actively combat the Einstellung effect but if you do it right it shouldn't be much harder to undo incorrect pitch accent.

This is done by learning things previously learned, in a new way. For example, if you learn incorrect pitch accent for a word you can read the word backwards and reverse the pitch. Learning pitch accent in that way should help pass over Einstellung, also using metaphors and analogies is good for bypassing it.

I'm still all for studying phonetics early, but giving people who are years into their study some encouragement can't be bad either.

[u/originalforeignmind]

I've seen and heard of many Japanese learners crying about placement tests. I feel sorry for those who feel they didn't get placed in the right level class, but at the same time, I also feel very sorry for the teachers who are dealing with this "issue" every placement season. I'm really impressed how you chose to look at it positively and started learning phonetics instead, and I hope your having stayed in 101 class also rewarded you in some other ways too.

One major reason why pitch accents are not decently taught at normal classes is that most learners hardly care about them, and I've met only a very few who were curious enough about them. (And the dialect variety also plays a role.) So, your background story was very interesting for me. A few decades ago, more learners cared a lot less about writing, but it has changed. Perhaps, if we get more learners who are curious about learning accents, we may get to see some changes in another decade or so.

[u/pdabaker]

Hasn't the ability to mimic native sounds completely fallen off by the time you're in high school anyway? It's well known that kids are better but as far as I know it has already bottomed out for most of us.